Austin Chapter of the American Statistical Association
Home
Officers
Committees
Meetings
Newsletters Events
Constitution
Membership
Employment
History
Pictures
Links

“Goal Programming and Data Envelopment Analysis as Methods for Estimating, Planning and Evaluating Organization Performances”
by
Wm W Cooper
The Foster Parker Professor (Emeritus) of Finance and Management
in the Red McCombs School of Business
at the University of Texas at Austin.

Bill’s research interests are wide ranging. He holds honorary Doctor of Science degrees from Ohio State and Carnegie Mellon Universities in the United States and the degree of Doctorado Honoris Causa in the University of Alicante in Spain. Author or coauthor of some 500 professional-scientific articles and 23 books, he is a member of the Accounting Hall of Fame, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and is a recipient of the John von Neumann Theory Prize awarded jointly by the Operations Research Society of America and The Institute of Management Sciences. He has recently received (2004) the Gold Medal of the International Multi-Criteria Decision Making Society and (jointly with Patrick Brockett, Linda Golden and Utai Pitaktong) he received the Robert L. Mehr award from the American Risk and Insurance Association “for the article published [in their journal] 10 years ago which has best withstood the test of time.”

Abstract

“Goal Programming” has been used in many different ways on many different problems. For example, it has been used to estimate LAV (Least Absolute Value) regressions in order to determine “executive salaries” for the major industrial appliance division of the General Electric Co. and it has been used to plan “equal opportunity employment programs” for the Office of Civilian Manpower Planning in the U.S. Navy. Currently, as noted in the attached paper, it is, by far, the most frequently used method for multi criteria decision making with multiple objectives.

“Data Envelopment Analysis” is directed to the complementary problem of evaluating and controlling actual performances. Based on non-parametric concepts it is being extensively used in many problems ranging from evaluating the performances of schools, hospitals and police forces as well as military recruiting and other activities, and is now being used to select the location of a new capital, in place of Tokyo, in Japan. In “A Bibliography of Data Envelopment Analysis (1978-2001)” by G. Tavares--which is to appear in Socio-Economic Planning Sciences--lists more than 3200 papers, books, etc., written by more than 1600 authors in more than 42 countries--all since the 1978 appearance of the paper on this topic by A. Charnes, W.W. Cooper and E. Rhodes in the European Journal of Operational Research.

Time permitting, joint uses of these two approaches in combination with customary statistical methods, such as ordinary least squares regressions, will be explored.

This page maintained by ASA Austin webmistress and was last updated February 23, 2004.